Please recommend some rim brake wheels and/or brake pads. Also, a story.

[Baron Blubba]

Yesterday I headed out for a late morning ride. A beautiful brisk spring day, temps in the low 50's, a nigh immaculately blue sky. I'm riding along on my Ritchey Logic, having a great time, thinking 'man, this is such an awesome ride, an all-time great for sure, perfect weather, great scenery, minimal traffic, friendly drivers, my mind and body are feeling good, phew whadda day!'

Midway through I'm climbing this hill when all of a sudden a great big gust of wind - I mean a GREAT BIG GUST OF WIND - comes out of nowhere and ushers in a fleet of storm clouds. I look into the distance at yonder mountains and see a swirling violent malevolency of rain and fog. A big fat raindrop splatters like oobleck upon my helmet. I'm 12 miles from home. The decision to forego the temptation to finish the climb and *then* turn around is made easy when a second, third, and then seven-hundredth raindrop promptly galosha down upon my helmet (it's a POC Tempus helmet, so has a solid cover over the top, thank goodness). The wind only gets stronger. The rain turns to hale. Of all the days to be riding the only rim brake bike in my collection. Wheels are Dura Ace C24 9000. Carbon with an aluminum brake faring, ostensibly good for wet weather braking. Well my Paceliney friends, you can ostensible your wet weather braking all you want, but I'm here to tell you that I rode home on steep twisty roads with perhaps 10% of the usual braking power, and it was quite scary.
Typically I don't ride this bike in inclement weather, but as we can see, sometimes inclement weather makes an unadvertised-on-your-iphone-weather-app appearance.

So, here are my questions:
1. Are there any brake pads so good that this issue would have been mitigated?
2. Which high performance rim brake wheel has the best stopping power in the wet and on long steep hills?
3. I'm looking for a truly amazing wheelset that *also* has strong and reliable braking performance.
4. Money is no object, so I don't care if BTLOS is the best value, I simply want *the best*. But if BTLOS is *the best*, then I'd gladly ride that!
5. If you've ridden a Dura Ace C24 series wheel (7900, 9000, 9100) *and* say, a Campy WTO Bora Ultra or a top of the line rim brake HED wheel, are the latter much better than the former in terms of overall performance? How about in terms of stopping power?

Thanks for your help!

Edit: PS, this is currently my favorite bike, so I'm not going to shelve it and only ride discs. Even with a better-braking-in-wet set of wheels, this will still be a Dry Weather bike...but I want to be as prepared as can be, in case of situations like the one described above.